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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]No. It's always been this way but people went along with things and used denial. There was significant shame around mental illness and addiction so people hid it or lied about it. There was also no language to talk about some behaviors we know more about today (i.e., PTSD) and people "kept it in the family."

People were also ashamed to get divorced so they stayed in marriages they should not have or made up stories. In my family there were great aunts who remarried after they left their husbands or their husbands left them and they moved to different states. They claimed to be widows. My grandmother never uttered a peep about that. I only know from doing genealogy. These husbands were still alive and there were no divorces. I think in many ways society was more sick in the past. [/quote]

I agree. I think it was the same if not far worse. I’ll volunteer my messed up family as an example.

My family and DH’s family have always had heaps of mental illness, but in the past there were euphemisms, early death, and shame to keep it quiet. His side has a host of distant relatives overseas who sort of disappeared and eft kids with other people’s families and they’d just pretend to be additional cousins. And some people on his side who have been hospitalized after interventions probably would have successfully taken their own lives or “gone missing” way back in the day.

In my side, people who were a bit troubled also went into the army or were sent out west to work in a way that is less accessible to that population now. Drinking as self-medication was also far easier to hide in the drinking culture of the day. A lot of those people in my family (male cousins and siblings of my grandparents) would probably be using drugs and living on the streets now.

On my side you can also find depressed people who drank themselves to death while everyone quietly looked the other way and called it a heart attack or old age at the end. Plus people who may have had schizophrenia or been bipolar and could not work consistently but were a step above indigent because life was cheap enough to live in a 1bdr/1ba house across the tracks with a small garden and occasional family help.

I have a relative who spend years in and out of Hazelden back when it first opened, but everyone talked about it like it had been a fishing trip to Minnesota. As a kid I actually though Hazelden was a fancy resort and couldn’t figure out why no one else in our family got to go there.[/quote]

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